A device of unknown origin and unimaginable power, the AllSpark can create life itself and was the source of the Transformer race. For millions of years, Autobots and Decepticons waged the Great War over controlling it, with the Autobots only managing to defeat the Decepticons after they sent the AllSpark through a space bridge portal, keeping it safely out of evil hands and effectively removing the wild card from remaining battles. If wielded by Decepticons, it would be a weapon of destruction like no other. In other words, same thing as the movie.

It seems to have a will of its own, seeking out qualified bearers and uniting even unlikely allies into a team.

It can also unfold really purdy.

Contents

Fiction

Animated cartoon

Optimus Prime and his crew of Autobots were repairing a space bridge when it activated on them. Once Prime shut down the bridge, they stumbled across the AllSpark, hidden away inside a rock, having apparently emerged while the bridge was active. Ratchet told them of its history and significance in the Great War, believing that the AllSpark had now found them, rather than the other way around. Almost immediately, the Decepticon leader Megatron and his crew showed up in their warship, tracking the AllSpark's energy readings. Megatron attacked the fleeing Teletran-1 to claim the AllSpark himself, but his attempt was sabotaged by a bomb placed on him by his lieutenant, Starscream. The explosion sent the Autobots' ship careening out of control until the AllSpark activated the space bridge, which itself exploded after the ship went through.

The ship emerged in low orbit over Earth and soon crash-landed in Lake Erie, not far from Detroit. Fifty years later, the Autobots came out of emergency stasis and ventured into the city to save people from a rampaging monster. Bumblebee quickly befriended a young girl named Sari Sumdac, who convinced him to take her aboard the Autobots' ship when his teammate Prowl was badly injured. While aboard, Sari came in contact with the AllSpark, which decided for some reason to open up to her—in more ways than one. It reconfigured her security keycard into a powerful tool. With this new key, Sari could revive Autobots, activate machinery, screw up robots, and much more.

For a time, the Autobots were celebrated as Detroit's newest superheroes, but then Starscream tracked them down. He took hostages and demanded the AllSpark in exchange for their return. With Sari's help, the hostages were freed, but Starscream still managed to get hold of the AllSpark, and he quickly started obliterating sections of Detroit with it. Prime attempted to wrestle the AllSpark away from him, but again it opened, this time unleashing a powerful surge of energy that blasted away Starscream to parts unknown. Prime was left dangling from a tremendous height and quickly fell. He did not survive the impact, but in desperation, Sari used the reconfigured Key on him. The AllSpark intervened directly this time, and Prime's spark was restored online. Transform and Roll Out!

After this, the AllSpark remained on board the Autobots' at the bottom of Lake Erie for some time. Lost and Found

Ouch.

The day of reckoning the Autobots had long feared came to pass when Megatron was restored and went to claim the AllSpark once again. Inserting the AllSpark into his chest, he planned to use it as a weapon to destroy Earth and conquer Cybertron. However, Optimus Prime used the Key to crack the AllSpark. In the resulting energy surge, the AllSpark was destroyed and its energy dispersed. With its destruction, the Key became the most powerful Cybertronian artifact on the planet Earth, if not in theuniverse. Megatron Rising - Part 2

AllSpark Fragments

Crystalline shards of the AllSpark landed all throughout the greater Detroit area and were able to endow life into any machine with sufficient cybernetic technology. The first one discovered was in one of Isaac Sumdac's robots while he was working on Megatron's space bridge. It went haywire, and the Decepticons thought it was Sumdac, so Megatron blasted it and found the fragment in what was left of its arm. Megatron theorized that the shards could have spread across the entire world. A Sumdac Systems assembly line had empowered some Security Drones, which showed hostility to everything around them until they were either destroyed or had the AllSpark shards removed from them. Optimus's Autobots and the Elite Guard put a stop to this and extracted the AllSpark fragment from the controls. The Elite Guard.

AllSpark shards are sufficiently powerful enough to sustain Transformer life even after their sparks have been extinguished, as Starscream discovered. He later found an AllSpark shard in a truck and planted it on a train to lure out Megatron. Mission Accomplished

The ninth AllSpark fragment was in Slo-Mo's timepiece. This was able to slow down time around whatever electronic device on which it was used. It also was used to restore Nanosec to his rightful age. SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy

In the both Endgame, Part I and Endgame, Part II, AllSpark fragments featured prominently. In Part One, Prowl is able to use his processor over matter technique to coalesce a fragment that had apparently been more or less vaporized. Later, Megatron uses the fragments Ratchet had used to power Omega Supreme in A Bridge Too Close, Part II to power his Lugnut Supreme clones. Finally, in Part II, Prowl and Jazz combine forces to gather all the fragments they could (of which there were apparently hundreds) back into a whole AllSpark, to counter the clones. This includes the one that gave Starscream life.

Notes

The AllSpark's powers, enigmatic origin, and storyline role are very similar to the synonymous device from the live-action movie. The look of the outer container, however, is more of an homage to the Matrix of Leadership (i.e. an orange-ish container with bracketed handles and a window in front that opens outward to reveal a glowing, blue, spherical crystal suffused with blue energy). However, the AllSpark here is angular and cubic rather than curved and spheroid like the Matrix, basically hybridizing the looks of the movie and Generation One devices. Unlike its Movie counterpart, it does not kill a Transformer that merges the power source, the inner crystal, with his/her Spark, but grants him/her great power as long as the crystal remains intact, a very similar effect to that of the Heart of Cybertron. Also it's power is able to bring pieces of technology to life, sound familiar?

At BotCon 2008, Animated creative team Marty Isenberg, Matt Youngberg, and Derrick Wyatt stated that they had no intention of providing an in-story explanation of the AllSpark, because to do so would run the risk of making the artifact less interesting, or being so bizarre that it shattered the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, or being so wildly convoluted that explaining it all would end up overshadowing the actual series story, or all of the above. They specifically cited the Star Wars prequel trilogy's "midichlorian" explanation of the Force as something that convinced them it was better to let the AllSpark remain a mystery. After all, when Generation One tried something like that, we got stuck with the Quintessons.